Saturday, August 29, 2015

Over the past
couple of weeks I have been viewing back episodes of the British murder mystery
TV series Midsomer Murders. Set in
the fictional English county of Midsomer, the series revolves around the
efforts of Chief Inspector Detective Barnaby, who is attached to the CID of a
town called Causton, to resolve the murders that afflict the county.

A possible
reason for the attraction is that the series is a loving dedication to the English
countryside, and to the imagined English way of life. Midsomer Murders elevates what it sees as English reality with
great aplomb. There are long loving shots of breath-taking English countryside.
Added to this are the details that are worked into the stories: a focus on
contemporary English villages, the age-old social institutions, the rituals of
these institutions, the relationship between the gentry and the village-folk.
So lovingly ethnographic is the gaze of this series, that despite the glut of
murder and nastiness that fills these episodes one can’t help but feel how
wonderful it must be to live in rural England.

After a
substantial period of time, when I was more than a dozen or so episodes into
the drama, a rather discomfiting thought hit me. The series contained an
overwhelming number of white persons! It seemed as if there were no persons of
colour in the episodes. That is when I started actually looking for people of
colour and sure enough, not a single person in evidence!

Reflecting on
this situation I was reminded of an
article that discussed the problems of race in video games. Mounting
responses to the standard apologies that one gets, the author Bao Phi phrased
one that has remained with me ever since, and seemed particularly appropriate
in the case of Midsomer’s
disappearance of English people of colour. The apology normally reads “Games
like Final Fantasy and Dragon Age are based in European folklore and there were
no people of color in Medieval Europe.” Phi’s response is clever and hits the
nail bang on the head: “Actually there were people of color in Medieval
Europe.You know what?There were more actual people of color in
Medieval Europe than there were REAL FIREBREATHING DRAGONS OR PEOPLE WHO COULD
SUMMON MOTORCYCLES OUT OF THIN AIR WITH THEIR MAGIC POWERS.”

This response
makes it so obvious that the constructions of our fantasies are not as innocent
as we make them out to be, but invariably involve a choice. That there were
more murderers in fictional Midsomer than people of colour suggests that the
producers of the show wished to show was that there was no space for people of colour in real English life and the
England of the imagination.

Something else
that struck me about Midsomer Murders
was the dramatic way in which it contrasted with American versions of the
similar genre like Castle, or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
In the episodes that I have seen, Chief Inspector Barnaby and his associate
have practically never been shown with a gun. American versions of this genre,
however, are replete with the presence, and use, of guns. It should be pointed
out that I am unfamiliar with the way in which the police and detectives in
England actually operate. It is possible that just as the non-depiction of
people of colour highlighted the way the producers of Midsomer wished to imagine England, perhaps the depiction of a folksy
and unarmed police detective is also far from English reality. However, what is
important is the manner in which the ideal comportment of the police are
depicted. As suggested earlier, just as with advertising, television series
such as Midsomer Murders are
important because they set up an ideal world that we then look for in real
life. To this extent, Midsomer Murders
suggests that the use of guns is an aberration, while the American series
normalise the use of guns suggesting that the ONLY way in which law and order
can be enforced is via the use of guns.

Because
television is so ubiquitous in our lives it forms the basis of our expectations
of reality. For the great Indian middle class that feeds off American
television, American drama series offer a vision of what life in the USA is
like. Seeing police with guns, all too often their demand is that police in
India also be armed with guns. What they do not see is the kind of racist and
gratuitous violence that is meted out by police in the US to persons of colour,
and the fact that this violent tendency is aggravated by the carrying of lethal
weapons. Of course, given the caste-based nature of the Indian middle class, it
is perhaps something that they would not care too much about. Nevertheless, it
bears remembering that once unleashed, the spiral of violence is difficult to
contain.

It is not
uncommon to hear howls of protest whenever social justice issues are raised
vis-à-vis films and episodes on television. “Oh, but this is just fantasy” it
is claimed. Another standard trope is, “but film is about stereotypes!” Indeed,
televisual representation may be about stereotypes, but these representations also impact on our expectations of reality. It is for this reason that it is
critical that the representations in film and television are not simply
shrugged off as fantasy, but challenged not only to embody reality, but also
embody a just reality that we would like to see translated to reality.

Friday, August 21, 2015

Some time ago,
speaking on the BBSM’s platform against the assertions of FORCE Uday Bhembre, is reported to have represented
“the FORCE action as not a mere step for English medium but a revival of the
Portuguese agenda to denationalise Goans from its language and culture.” In
addition, Bhembre suggested that, “‘English medium is a step of
deculturisation, leading to the ultimate agenda of denationalisation. These are
the same people who line up in front of the Portuguese Consulate for Portuguese
passports. Tomorrow, these people would not hesitate to chant a slogan – Viva
Portugal’”. Bhembre is not the only person to have made these suggestions.Arvind Bhatikar is
reported to have made similar statements.

Persons familiar
with recent history will
not be surprised that Uday Bhembre is associating with the Hindu
nationalist RSS and engaging in hate speech against the Catholics in Goa. However,
at least the 80s this is the man who was hailed by the hierarchy of the
Catholic Church as one of the most secular leaders of Goan society. How then,
did this switch take place?

This confusion
will be allayed, and Bhembre’s recent statements make sense, if we place him
within a tradition that seeks brahmanical hegemony over both Konkani and Goa.

For this it is necessary
that we go back into the past, to The
Triumph of Konkani penned by Vaman Varde Valaulikar (translated by
Sebastian Borges, 2003), fondly known to his spiritual children as Shenoi Goembab.
The first chapter of Valaulikar’s polemic seeks to establish that Konkani is
the mother-tongue of Goa. This task was important for Valaulikar, because he
was in fact trying to persuade members of his caste group to accept Konkani as
their mother-tongue. This was not an easy task, because many of them, like a
certain Raghunath Ganesh Shenoy Talwadkar, identified Konkani with the
Catholics of Goa. Valaulikar spends some time in this chapter responding to Talwadkar’s
arguments.

What is very
clear from reading the polemic is that Talwadkar had a horrific distaste for
Christians. Valaulikar indicates that Talwadkar had disparaged Dr. José Gerson
da Cunha as a “defiled Christian”, “bigot”, and “goanese”; and had indicated
his argument against adopting Konkani as a mother tongue because it was a
Catholic tongue derived from the language of “the very low classes viz.
fisherfolk and farmers (p.16).”

Valaulikar’s
response to Talwadkar is very interesting. To the suggestion that Konkani is a
language of lower caste Catholics, Valaulikar’s suggests that while Konkani may
have been developed by the missionaries, these “priests in Goa learnt their
Konkani from the Brahmins alone (p.21).” In other words, he
dismisses the possibility that humble folk may have been at the root of
developing the language. With regard to da Cunha, Valaulikar’s response is even
more revealing. Rather than tick Talwadkar off for his prejudices, Valaulikar’s
responds, “Dr. Gersonbab is certainly not a religious fanatic; he is a
large-hearted, virtuous scholarly Brahmin who, having been born in Goa,
endeavoured to spread worldwide the glory of his motherland (p.32).” In short,
what Valaulikar stresses as redeeming about the language and da Cunha is the
fact that they are both brahmin.

This reference
to history is to highlight that, while Valaulikar’s project may have been about
Konkani, it was also about establishing Brahmin hegemony over the Konkani
language. The period in which Valaulikar lived and worked was the period when
dominant castes across India, and especially southern India, were preparing to
create linguistic homelands where they could rule the roost.If the Saraswat caste was to compete with
others, it was necessary that they have both a territory and a language. To
fulfil this task, it was important to convince people like Talwadkar that
Konkani was indeed their language. To do this, it was necessary to take Konkani
away from the labouring castes, in particular the Catholic bahujan, both in Goa
and especially in Bombay, and convert it into the property of the Brahmins. This
was done by constructing a history that suggested Konkani was developed by
brahmins and creating a hitherto unknown language, Konkani in the Nagri script.
This also required that the development of Konkani during the colonial period
be erased. The tragedy is that this period of the early to mid-twentieth
century was exactly the period when the Catholic bahujan, drawing on Christian
and European sources, were crafting a golden period for Konkani by reading, writing,
composing
music, and crafting
theatre in the language. To make Valualikar’s fiction into fact required
that history itself be denied, and this is why Bhembre wilfully ignores a
complex Goan history to make the hateful suggestions about denationalisation.

This is the
common link that joins the appeal of Marathi to the bahujan of Goa from the ‘60s
to the ‘80s, the fight for the official recognition of Konkani in the Roman
script, and the demand that the Government support English language as a medium
of primary education. All of these are directed against Brahmin and brahmanical
oppression, and it for this reason that brahmin supremacists like Bhembre have
been opposed to all three of these liberation projects. It is possible that Bhembre
is not in essence a Hindu nationalist, but has a more limited agenda of
Saraswat hegemony in Goa. However, given that Hindu nationalism is a project
that seeks, and sees, brahmins as the natural rulers of the land, it is little
wonder that Bhembre makes common cause with the RSS and the BBSM.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 21 Aug 2015)

Friday, August 7, 2015

Not too long ago
I was part of a group being offered a guided tour of the palace of Tristão da Cunha, a Portuguese
nobleman and adventurer who was nominated the first Viceroy of Goa. Even though
nominated, however, da Cunha was not able to take up his position owing to a
case of temporary blindness. Yet this
did not stop Cunha from acquiring other important charges from the Portuguese
crown. At some point in the course of this tour the guide paused and spoke of
the fact that, in 1514, Tristão da
Cunha was sent by Dom Manuel II as ambassador to Pope Leo X. Trying to
impress on his audience the significance of the embassy, our tour guide
indicated that the embassy proceeded to the court of the Pope in grand style,
containing, in addition to the famous elephant Hannibal, “Indians, Africans and
Amerindians.” The guide then went on to express his disappointment that the
quincentennial anniversary of this event had passed by almost unmarked.

I instinctively
stiffened when I heard this description of the embassy.Given that the guide had been engaging in
what is a common Portuguese habit of referring to the early modern Portuguese
as “we Portuguese”, there was a certain suggestion of unequal power relations
between the Portuguese and the aforementioned peoples that I found
distasteful.My presentiment was not
misplaced. Hardly a couple of minutes after this description, an acquaintance
who was also a member of the group came up to me and grinning broadly suggested
“Why Jason, to commemorate the quincentennial we should send you to the Pope!”

Even though I
laughed off the suggestion, I was furious and felt humiliated. Having met only
once before, and belonging to an extended circle of friends, this man was
clearly trying to be friendly, and yet he had got it so wrong! He was blissfully aware of my resentment
because he was firmly in the grip of two features of Portuguese life. The first
is the tendency of segments of elite Portuguese to have a sense of ownership
over Goa, and other former territories of the empire. The second, is the
failure of contemporary Portuguese to make a distinction between themselves and
the Portuguese of the early modern period.

Unknowningly or
otherwise, this man, was violating a number of the norms that should structure
post-colonial relations in the Portuguese world. First, by suggesting that I
was an “Indian”, he was effectively placing me in a larger racial category that
robbed me of the peculiarities of my history. Second, there was the failure to
recognise that the persons sent to the Pope in the embassy of Dom Manuel II
were probably not free, but enslaved persons.Dom Manuel II used the exotica of these people in their strange, but
rich, dresses, to impress upon Pope Leo X, that he was a ruler of imperial
dimensions and deserved the privilege of the Padroado Real that would secure for him a pre-eminent place among
the princes of Christendom. In making this facile suggestion that presenting an
“Indian” to the Pope could amount to a meaningful commemoration of the event,
this man failed to see that he was repeating earlier models of unjustly hierarchical
relationships, rather than those of equality that should mark our democratic
times.

There have been
at least two kinds of traditional responses to these situations. The first is
to use class to break up the racial humiliation involved, and thus suggest that
one’s ancestors were elites and never enslaved persons, and thus not the kinds
who were presented to the Pope. The
other response is that which has led to the more traditional Indian nationalist
type responses that we suffer in Goa. This response crafts a distinct Indian
identity for Goans that is opposed to the Portuguese, and crafts a Portuguese
history in Goa that is filled with one atrocity after the other.

Both responses
are obviously problematic. The first because while opposing racism it
strengthens systems of class and caste oppression; the second on the other hand
ignores the fact that so much of a Goan identity – or any identity born from
the colonial encounter – is a mixed one. Being Goan we are as much Portuguese
as we are Indian. Rather than rejecting racism, this second retort is actually framed
within racist frames and consolidates racial identities. Not surprisingly,
given how caste is also a racial formation, it also works to consolidate
upper-caste identities, and their histories of displacement, even as lower
caste memories of liberation through the intervention of the Europeans and the
various Christian churches, despite the fact of slavery and other issues, are
cast aside.

In light of this
scenario, it appears that an ideal response to the situation I found myself in
rests not necessarily in quick come back, but a commitment to a larger and
longer dialogue committed to a broader agenda of democracy. The challenge is to
attack both Indian nationalism, that denies complex histories, and Portuguese
elitism that exercises a sense of ownership over the lower orders of the
country as well as persons from former territories.

Tuesday, August 4, 2015

The theme of the
passion of Christ is a profound part of Western European art. This is hardly
surprising, as the process leading to Christ’s death is of critical importance
to Christianity. Moreover, the passion of Christ provided artists with the
opportunity to express, through the figures of Mary the mother of Christ, Mary
Magdalene, John the evangelist, and the other disciples, some of the more profound
emotions known to humans: anguish, grief and mourning, tenderness, comfort, and
resignation.

As important as
the individual figures in these scenes are to the larger canvas, quite
naturally the tortured body of Christ receives special treatment by the artist.
The viewer is invited to gaze at the brutalized and lifeless body of Christ and
contemplate the suffering that, according to Christian tradition, Christ
willingly undertook to save humanity.

This focus on
the violated body of Christ also draws from the medieval tradition that concentrated
prayerful devotion on the five wounds of Christ: the two nails that pierced his
hands, the two that penetrated his feet, and the one on his side, where the
lance impaled him. Just as figurative art took inspiration from this devotion,
so too did the musical tradition. A particular favourite of mine is the
Danish-German composer Dieterich Buxtehude’s oratorio Membra Jesus Nostri.
As the name suggests, this composition is dedicated to the contemplation of
seven—not five—wounds of Christ. Broken up into seven cantatas, this work
contemplates Christ’s feet, knees, hands, side, breast, heart, and head.

As critiques of
Mel Gibson’s famous film The Passion of the
Christ indicate, however, no matter how great the suffering, the passion of
Christ acquires its complete meaning from the fact that subsequent to his
death, Christ was resurrected. To focus merely on his death and passion,
therefore, is to miss the entire point of the Passion. The Christian belief
about the Resurrection is that through
his victory over death, Christ also conquered time and space. It is perhaps the
recognition of this transcendence that has allowed artists to see and depict
the broken body of Christ in a variety of forms and places.

Take, for
example, the very moving sculpture by Maksymilian
Biskupski in the Military Cathedral of the Polish Army, Warsaw. Titled Christ
of All the Lost, the figure is completely abstracted from the context of
Christ’s traditional life cycle. In this image, Biskupsi presents Christ
through the figure of a corpse dressed in military uniform, excavated from the
grave, soil still clinging to his body. The figure is one among other bodies
protruding from a common grave. The sculpture was intended to be a memorial to
the Katyn massacre which saw the murder of thousands of Polish Army officers in
the 1930s. Through this art work, Bikupski successfully twines the grief of
those mourning for the officers with that felt for Christ, and suggests that
Christ is among us, suffering when the innocent and weak suffer and are killed.

This identification of Christ with the
wretched of the earth is, of course, not Biskupsi’s innovation but has a
venerable tradition within Christianity. An illustrative case is that of St.
Martin of Tours. According to tradition, prior to becoming a Christian, Martin
was a Roman soldier, and while stationed in Gaul, encountered a mendicant
freezing in the cold. Moved to pity, he shared half his cloak with the
mendicant. Later that night, he was blessed with a vision, where the mendicant
revealed himself as Christ, who praised him for following the teaching of
seeing identification with the poor and the
wretched as service to God and the path to salvation.

It was in this context that I encountered
the three images of Peter Hujar that were captured by his former lover, David
Wojnarowicz. On display at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City,
as part of the on-going exhibition America Is Hard to
See, the images of Hujar were taken moments
after his death from AIDS. These three images feature Hujar’s hollowed out
face, his feet sticking out from under the bed sheet that became his shroud,
and a limp hand by his side. I was deeply moved by these images, and for a
moment saw not the dead Hujar but Christ himself, as was perhaps Wojnarowicz’
intention. As I learned at the exhibition, Wojnarowicz was part of a group of
homosexual artists who participated in the culture wars of the 1980s and
demanded that the U.S. government pay greater attention to the AIDS epidemic
that was killing thousands of men at the time.

The tradition of Christian art in Western
Europe wasn’t simply about filling up a space with pretty pictures; rather, by
drawing upon our deepest emotions it sought to teach the faithful to empathise
with the life of Christ and his saints. When contemporary artists transcend the
immediate context of Christ’s life, but draw upon the Christian tradition, they
perform the equally important task of helping us see Christ and his saints, not
only in images in church but more importantly, in the world around us.

About Me

Itinerant mendicant captures two aspects of my life perfectly. My educational formation has seen me traverse various terrains, geographical as well as academic. After a Bachelor's in law from the National Law School of India, I worked for a while in the environmental and developmental sector. After a Master's in the Sociology of Law, I obtained a Doctorate in Anthropology in Lisbon for my study of the citizenship experience of Goan Catholics. I am currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology at the University Institute of Lisbon, but continue to shuttle between Lisbon and Goa.
I see myself as a mendicant not only because so many of my voyages have been funded by scholarships and grants but because I will accept almost any offer for sensorial and intellectual stimulation, and thank the donor for it.
This blog operates as an archive of my writings in the popular press.